Jazzy Jeff: The Three A’s

As of last Thursday, I can add the Job Centre Plus to the list of organisations who don’t want anything to do with me. Apparently, holidaying in the south of France is not an acceptable reason to miss your dole appointment. It’s official: I am too incompetent to claim state benefits, let alone hold down a high flying graduate career. And thus, having enjoyed European holidays and homeland high living thanks to taxpayer’s money for the last five months, I am finally penniless.

However, there’s an old piece of wisdom that has served me well through a number of financial crises: give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man how to sell a fish on Gumtree.com and he’ll go hungry that night, but have enough cash in hand to go to the pub.

Bearing my trusty motto in mind, I took to the internet to flog my parent’s possessions. I won’t lie to you, trusty reader, there’s a certain pang of guilt that accompanies selling off treasured family heirlooms on Gumtree in return for beer money. I imagine this is how the last survivors of a once resplendent aristocratic dynasty might feel, brought low by a succession of wastrel sons, and finally forced to hoof the family castle. Only, unlike Downton Abbey, there isn’t a nouveau riche heiress at hand, game for marriage and my subsequent fiscal recovery.   

Having given a precise monetary value (£10) to, and successfully sold, one particularly poignant part of the family’s collective memory, I was all set for my evening on the tiles. ‘Going large’ on a tenner isn’t all that easy, so I’ll briefly recount my evening, and in doing so enlighten you as to the ‘Three A’s’ of enjoying unemployment: Affordability, Adaptability, and Appeal.

Affordability: overheads must be kept to a minimum.

Rather than take a taxi into town, I catch the bus. There’s only so long that you can convince yourself that getting a clear view on a starry night is adequate compensation for living an hour-and-a-sodding-half away from anywhere resembling civilisation. If I lived any closer to town I would save my bus money and walk.

The next essential for my big night out is fags. I plump for a ten pack of Mayfair, a very reasonably priced cigarette. Not Pall Mall, thank you very much; I may not be able wreath myself in a perfumed veil of Gauloises smoke like in the heady years of yore, but I’m still a well dressed jazz aficionado, not a fucking tramp.

Adaptability: when all you’ve got is lemons, make limoncello.  

Upon arrival I sidle up to the bar, clutching at enough copper to rewire the internet, and order a pint. Long before my lips touch that amber nectar, the smell hits me – like the bastard child of a fart and an armpit – the beer is nauseatingly stale.

To the moneyed undergraduate, a bad pint would probably be cause for annoyance. To the destitute graduate it’s like hitting the jackpot. “What ho, good barkeep!” says I, having swiftly sunk a good ¾ of the putrid stuff, “I think your Deuchars is a tad off today. How about a lager replacement?” The key to surviving unemployed life is seeing opportunity in apparent catastrophe and making the most of your environment.

Appeal: no dear reader, not sex appeal (though I’m not too shabby, if I say so myself), but appealing to the charity of others.

By this stage of the night I’m outside one of Edinburgh’s classic old-man boozers waiting for a friend to arrive. I get chatting to a man who turns out to be the best spoken down-and-out I’ve ever encountered.

“Barbour, what?” says he, commenting on my snazzy jacket, before inquiring: “Farming man, are you?” Hello, here’s an opportunity. I widen my eyes to Disney proportions and snuffle pathetically before saying: “What I’d give to be landed. I’ve spent my last pennies on a pint in this rotten bar!” or words to similar effect.

My appeal works like a charm. I was expecting him to stand me a round on account of my poverty, but my new-found friend replies “Well, if you’re not a snob [which I most certainly am not], have something from my lucky dip!” Under other circumstances, my hard-won sense of self-preservation would prevent me reaching into a homeless man’s ‘lucky dip’, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Throwing caution to the wind I reach into this ruffled gent’s satchel and triumphantly retrieve a reassuringly inexpensive can of Stella.

My friend finally arrives to find me having a rum time with this lovable old duffer, drinking tinnys on the steps of the cathedral, me generously plying him with Mayfairs. If you know what you’re about, and keep to the three A’s, unemployment need never get in the way of the good life.